The Bush Administration issued its first National Security Strategy in
September 2002, a year after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States by
al Qaeda. The documents Chapter V summarizes the Administrations approach
to using force, known as the Bush Doctrine. It essentially reiterates, in four pages,
presidential statements made over the months following 9/11, including the
Presidents speeches before a Joint Session of Congress on 20 September 2001, before
the Warsaw Conference on Combating Terrorism on 6 November, his State of the Union Address
on 29 January 2002, his remarks before the student body of the Virginia Military Institute
on 17 April, and his address to the graduating class at the US Military Academy at West
Point on 1 June. The Bush Administration now has in place a clear, declaratory
use-of-force policy whose objective is stated in Chapter Vs title: Prevent Our
Enemies from Threatening Us, Our Allies, and Our Friends with Weapons of Mass
Destruction.

This article
identifies and examines the Bush Doctrines major tenets, and then assesses the
doctrines strengths and weaknesses within the context of the Administrations
prospective attack on Iraq.

The Threat

The Bush Doctrine
rests on a definition of the threat based upon what it sees as the combination of
radicalism and technologyspecifically, political and religious extremism
joined by the availability of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In his West Point speech,
President Bush declared:

The gravest danger
to freedom lies at the crossroads of radicalism and technology. When the spread of
chemical and biological and nuclear weapons, along with ballistic missile
technologywhen that occurs, even weak states and small groups

4/5

could attain a
catastrophic power to strike great nations. Our enemies have declared this very intention,
and have been caught seeking these terrible weapons.1

Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld has subsequently and repeatedly spoken of the emergence of a nexus
between terrorist networks, terrorist states, and weapons of mass destruction . . . that
can make mighty adversaries of small or impoverished states and even relatively small
groups of individuals.2

The Bush Doctrine
identifies three threat agents: terrorist organizations with global reach, weak states
that harbor and assist such terrorist organizations, and rogue states. Al Qaeda and the
Talibans Afghanistan embody the first two agents. Rogue states are defined as states
that:

. . . brutalize
their own people and squander their national resources for the personal gain of the
rulers; display no regard for international law, threaten their neighbors, and callously
violate international treaties to which they are party; are determined to acquire weapons
of mass destruction, along with other advanced military technology, to be used as threats
or offensively to achieve the aggressive designs of these regimes; sponsor terrorism
around the globe; and reject human values and hate the United States and everything it
stands for.3

The key attributes
are regime aggressiveness and the search for WMD, especially nuclear weapons, which are
far more efficient engines of mass slaughter than chemical and biological weapons.4

This definition of
rogue states seems to be modeled on Iraq, although Iran is a much greater purveyor of
international terrorism, and North Korea, the third axis of evil state, is
believed to have already acquired nuclear weapons capacity. North Korea has, however,
pursued a foreign policy of moderation in recent years, at least until its October 2002
confession that it had resumed its nuclear weapons program in contravention of a 1994
agreement to suspend it. The Bush Administration has nonetheless sought a diplomatic
solution via the enlistment of pressure from Tokyo and Beijing on Pyongyang. There has
been no talk of war against North Korea, even though Pyongyang has a far more advanced
nuclear program than Iraqs, and even though Kim Jong Il is, if anything, more
unpredictable than Saddam Hussein.5 The
Bush Administration apparently credits North Korea with relatively benign intentions; in
the case of Iraq, however, it has come very close to equating capabilities and
intentionsi.e., inferring intent to use WMD offensively by virtue of their very
existence in Iraq. For example, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage has declared
that the unrelenting drive to possess weapons of mass destruction brings about the inevitability
that they will be used against us or our interests.6

5/6

A key feature of the
Bush Doctrines postulation of the threat is its conclusion that Cold War concepts of
deterrence and containment do not necessarilywork against WMD-seeking rogues
states and are irrelevant againstterrorist organizations. In the Cold
War, states the National Security Strategy, we faced a generally status
quo, risk-averse adversary. . . . But deterrence based only on the threat of retaliation
is less likely to work against leaders of rogue states more willing to take risks,
gambling with the lives of their people, and the wealth of their nations. . . .
Traditional concepts of deterrence will not work against a terrorist enemy.7 This judgment echoes President Bushs earlier
remarks in his West Point speech: Deterrence, the promise of massive retaliation
against nations, means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or
citizens to defend. And, Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators
with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide
them to terrorist allies.8 (In contrast to containment of communism,
which was aimed at its territorial expansion, containment of Iraq since 1991 has targeted
Saddams territorial and nuclear ambitions. It is therefore
vertical as well as horizontal.) Thus, according to the Bush
Doctrine, rogue states are a double threat; they not only seek to acquire WMD for
themselves but also could transfer them to terrorist allies.

Making matters
worse, argues the White House, the threat is not just undeterrableit is also
imminent, requiring urgent responses. Less than two months after the 9/11 attacks,
President Bush declared, We will not wait for the authors of mass murder to gain
weapons of mass destruction.9 In his
subsequent State of the Union Address, he further stated that time is not on our
side. I will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws
closer and closer.10 At West Point, he warned, If we
wait for threats to materialize, we will have waited too long.11 His National Security Strategy declares simply,
We cannot let our enemies strike first.12 National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice underscored the
Administrations sense of imminent danger, telling CNN on 8 September 2002 that the
risk of waiting for conclusive proof of Saddam Husseins determination to acquire
nuclear weapons was too great because we dont want the smoking gun to become a
mushroom cloud,13 a metaphor President Bush subsequently repeated.

In summary, the Bush
Doctrine postulates an imminent, multifaceted, undeterrable, and potentially calamitous
threat to the United Statesa threat that, by virtue of the combination of its
destructiveness and invulnerability to deterrence, has no precedent in American history.
By implication, such a threat demands an unprecedented response.

The Response

The judgment that we
are dealing with enemies who are prepared to strike first, to threaten
or use weapons of mass destruction against the United States,14 who would [not] hesitate to use weapons of mass
destruction if they be-

6/7

lieved it would
serve their purposes,15 inevitably dictates a policy of what the
Bush Administration has chosen to call anticipatory self-defense.16 The policy is billed as a strategy of preemption. In his
West Point speech, President Bush announced that the war on terror will not be won
on the defensive. We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans and confront the
worst threats before they emerge. In the world we have entered the only path to safety is
the path of action. And this nation will act.17 The National Security Strategy declares that the
United States has long maintained the option of preemptive actions to counter a
sufficient threat to our national security, and given the risk of inaction against
enemies prepared to strike first, the United States will, if necessary, act
preemptively.18 The National Security Strategy
goes on to say, Legal scholars and international jurists often conditioned the
legitimacy of preemption on the existence of an imminent threatmost often a visible
mobilization of armies, navies, and air forces preparing for attack. However,
We must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of
todays adversaries. Because rogue states know they cant win with
conventional weapons, they [will] rely on acts of terror and, potentially, the use
of weapons of mass destructionweapons that can be easily concealed, delivered
covertly, and used without warning.19

The Bush
Administration does not regard preemption as a substitute for traditional nonmilitary
measures such as sanctions and coercive diplomacy or for proactive counterproliferation
and strengthened nonproliferation efforts. Preemption is an add-on tailored to
deal with the new, non-deterrable threat. But the question does arise as to whether
preemption best characterizes the new policy. The Pentagons official
definition of preemption is an attack initiated on the basis of incontrovertible
evidence that an enemy attack is imminent.20 In contrast, preventive war is a war initiated in the belief
that military conflict, while not imminent, is inevitable, and that to delay would involve
great risk.21 Harvards Graham Allison has
captured the logic of preventive war: I may some day have a war with you, and right
now Im strong and youre not. So Im going to have the war now.
Allison went on to point out that this logic was very much behind the Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor, and in candid moments some Japanese scholars sayoff the
recordthat [Japans] big mistake was waiting too long.22

The difference
between preemption and preventive war is important. As defined above, preemptive attack is
justifiable if it meets Secretary of State Daniel Websters strict criteria,
enunciated in 1837 and still the legal standard, that the threat be instant,
overwhelming, leaving no choice of means and no moment for deliberation.23 Preemptive war has legal sanction.24 Preventive war, on the other hand, has none, because the
threat is neither certain nor imminent. This makes preventive war indistinguishable from
outright aggression, which may explain why the Bush Administration insists that its
strategy is preemptive, although some Cabinet officials have used the terms
interchangeably.

The problem, at
least with respect to Iraq, is the lack of convincing evidence, at least publicly
available evidence, that an Iraqi WMD attack on the United

7/8

States, its allies,
or its friends, is imminent. Such an attack seems inherently implausible because it would
invite, via devastating retaliation, the destruction of Saddam Hussein, his regime, and
even Iraq itself. And, ironically, notwithstanding the White Houses dismissal of
deterrence as insufficient against rogue states, the Administration has reportedly warned
the Iraqi dictator that he and his country face annihilation if he uses his
WMD against another country.25 The threat was generically repeated in
the Administrations December 2002 National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass
Destruction, which declared that the United States reserves the right to respond
with overwhelming forceincluding through resort to all our optionsto the use
of WMD against the United States, our forces abroad, and friends and allies.26
Presumably, these threats would not have been made absent some level of confidence in
deterrence. Perhaps the Administrations very campaign of threatening an attack on
Iraq is designed to reinforce deterrence. Yet deterrence requires the deterree to believe
that he will not be attacked if he does not commit the act to be deterred. If he is
convinced that we are coming anyway, is not deterrence undermined?

If an Iraqi attack
is not imminent, and indeed is deterrable in any event, then does not a US attack on Iraq
become a preventive war based on an assumption of the inevitability of hostilities and the
desire to strike before the military balance becomes less favorable (i.e., before Saddam
gets nuclear weapons)? The Bush Administrations statements and actions with respect
to Iraq point strongly to a conviction that war is inevitable, and its declared
willingness to start a war with Iraq is based on the Administrations stated judgment
that time is not on the American side. In his address to the nation from Cincinnati on 7
October 2002, Bush asked the question, If we know Saddam Hussein has dangerous
weapons today, and we do, does it make any sense for the world to wait to confront him as
he grows stronger and develops even more dangerous weapons? The President went on to
assert that Iraq could be less than a year away from building a nuclear
weapon, and that if allowed to do so, a terrible line would be crossed. Saddam
Hussein would be in a position to blackmail anyone who opposes his aggression . . . to
dominate the Middle East . . . [and] to threaten America by pass[ing] nuclear
technology to terrorists.27

There may indeed be
a case for starting a war, even a preventive war, with Iraq, but we should be clear on the
traditional distinction between preemptive attack and preventive war. On the other hand,
perhaps the National Security Strategy is right in insisting on the need to revisit
that traditional distinction in the face of undeterrable non-state enemies armed with WMD.
Perhaps the gulf between preemption and prevention, observes Michael Walzer,
has now narrowed so that there is little strategic (and therefore little moral)
difference between them.28 Moreover, against Iraq at least, the
United States has an established record of preventive military operations. As noted in
1994 by Richard Haass, who is now head of the State Departments Policy Planning
Staff, the Desert Storm coalitions attacks against Iraqi unconventional
warfare capabili-

8/9

ties inside Iraq
involved preventive employment of force; the capabilities targeted were not yet in a state
of development to affect the course of [the Gulf War].29 Indeed, by the time Desert Storm was launched, Kuwaits
liberationa certaintyhad become incidental to the larger aim of preventing
future Iraqi aggression by destroying Iraqi WMD capacity and gutting Iraqs
conventional military capabilities. Kuwait could have been liberated without striking
targets in Iraq, albeit at probably significantly greater cost.30

But assume, for the
moment, that the traditional distinction between preemption and preventive war does apply,
and that Iraq does pose a threat that justifies preemptive attack. Any preemptive attacker
must have overwhelming evidence of the enemys intention of imminent attack as well
as a capacity to launch swift and decisive strikesstrikes that quickly and
conclusively preempt the expected offensive military actions. Intentions, of course, are
notoriously difficult to gauge, and precisely because of this reality there is an innate
tendency to ascribe intentions from capabilities. Note has been made of the Bush
Administrations equation of Iraqi capabilities and Iraqi intentions. But intentions
to do what? There is no question that Saddam Hussein has chemical and biological weapons
and would love to have nuclear weapons. But for what purpose? The Bush Administration
argues that he is itching to use them against the United States and its allies and
friends. But could he not be seeking his own deterrent? In Israel and the United States he
faces two nuclear-armed adversaries; would not having his own nuclear weapons make his
enemies think twice before attacking himas well as offset Iraqs greatly
weakened conventional forces? And can we speculate that this is the real reason why the
Bush Administration wishes to attack him before he gets nuclear weapons? Middle East
expert Stephen Zunes contends that any Iraqi WMDs that may exist are under the
control of a highly centralized regime more interested in deterring a US attack than in
provoking one.31

The Bush
Doctrine: Five Observations

The Bush Doctrine
has sparked great controversy at home and abroad. Some critics see it as further testimony
to American unilateralism and arrogance; as the triumph within the Bush Administration of
a neo-conservative agenda aimed at ensuring a permanent American primacy in the world.
Others regard it as a reckless setting of a dangerous precedent that other states will
exploit to mask aggression. Still others see the doctrine as simply a construct to justify
an attack on Iraq. Proponents of the Bush Doctrine contend that a threat revolution is
under way which requires new approaches to using force. The 9/11 tragedy, they argue, was
a warning of worsemuch worsethings to come if the United States remains in the
reactive posture it assumed during the Cold War. The stakes, they claim, are as high as
they were during the Cold War, but we are now dealing with enemies who do not care whether
they live or die. As with many controversial topics, both supporters and critics exhibit
strengths and weaknesses in their arguments.

9/10

What follows is an
examination of their argumentation via five observations pertaining to the Bush Doctrine
and the threatened American attack on Iraq.

The threat of
WMD proliferated among suicidal or otherwise undeterrable terrorist groups is new, real,
and potentially catastrophic, but the Bush Administrations primary focus on regime
change in Iraq may be a focus on the periphery rather than the heart of the threat.

The Bush
Administration is absolutely right in identifying the possibility of a 9/11 with nuclear
weapons as the gravest threat to American security today. Every possible effort, including
preemptive attack, should be made to forestall this threats materialization. Al
Qaeda seeks our destruction and is inherently undeterrable. We have been at war with al
Qaeda since 9/11 (which renders preemption moot), and we are committed to continued
military operations against that enemy and its Taliban allies in Afghanistan until we are
satisfied that we can leave that country strong enough to prevent its relapse into a haven
for al Qaeda.

Why, then, does the
Bush Administration seek to start a second war against Iraq? Why, reportedly, just one day
after 9/11, did Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, suggest in a
National Security Council meeting that the al Qaeda attacks be used as a pretext for a US
attack on Iraq?32 Many commentators have observed that
Saddam Hussein represents unfinished business of the first Bush Administration, and that
Saddam Hussein did sponsor a plot to assassinate President George W. Bushs father.
But what is the connection between Iraq and al Qaeda? President Bush declared in late
September 2002 that you cant distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam when you
talk about the war on terrorism. Theyre both equally as bad, and equally as evil,
and equally as destructive. He added that the danger is that al Qaeda becomes
an extension of Saddams madness and his hatred and his capacity to extend weapons of
mass destruction around the world.33

But the
Administration has presented no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11 and no convincing
evidence of an operational relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. Both Saddam Hussein and
Osama bin Laden may hate the United States, but the former is a secular dictator on the
Stalinist model who has never hesitated to butcher Muslim clerics, whereas the latter is a
religious fanatic who regards secular Arab regimes as blasphemous. Other than hatred of
the United States, they do not have a common agenda,34 though the
history of international politics is replete with very strange bedfellows (e.g., Hitler
and Stalin, and then Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt).

As for the
Administrations asserted threat of a revenge-motivated Saddam Husseins
transfer of WMD to al Qaeda, there is no evidence that such a transfer has been made, even
though Hussein has had chemical and biological weapons for years. Moreover, the
Administration has not addressed the question of whether the Iraqi dictator could ever be
certain that he could make such a transfer without a trace of evidence. And even if he
could be certain on that score, would he not also have to worry that the Bush
Administration would consider an al Qaeda

10/11

WMD attack to be
prima facie evidence that such a transfer had been made? There is also the issue of
control. Saddam Hussein and his regime are about absolute political control because
control means survival. How likely is it, therefore, that Saddam, a Stalin-like paranoid
and megalomaniac who has a long record of repressing radical Islamists in his own country,
would transfer his own hard-earned WMD to an Islamist terrorist group beyond his control?35

If there is a
plausible scenario of Iraqi first use of WMD, including indirectly via transfer to a
terrorist group, is it not in response to an American attack on Iraq that placed Saddam in
the position of certain doom, thereby removing any deterrent obstacles to
taking down as many of his enemies as possible on the way to his own extinction? During
the Gulf War, Saddam pre-delegated orders to Iraqi Scud batteries to launch biological-
and chemical-armed missiles at Tel Aviv if the coalition forces advanced on Baghdad.36 President Bush himself has acknowledged that an
Iraqi regime faced with its own demise may attempt cruel and desperate
measures.37 A CIA assessment concluded that Saddam,
if convinced that a US attack could not be deterred, might decide that the extreme
step of assisting Islamist terrorists in conducting a WMD attack against the United States
would be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking large numbers of victims with
him.38 At a minimum, Saddam would target Israel and thereby guarantee his
posthumous fame among many in the Arab world. Thus, would not a US attack on Iraq make
Saddams first use of WMD a self-fulfilling prophesy? (All of this assumes, of
course, both a US decision for war and the survival, despite UN reinspection efforts that
began in December 2002, of deliverable Iraqi WMD.)

And if the aim of
the Bush Doctrine is to prevent the marriage of terrorism and WMD, should it not
concentrate first and foremost on destroying the vast and poorly secured stocks of WMD in
the countries of the former Soviet Union? Unlike Iraq, al Qaeda is a truly transnational
organization with cells in at least 60 countries. As such, and given its impressive
financial resources, al Qaeda seems well positioned to exploit opportunities posed by the
presence of so much loosely protected WMD, to say nothing of securing the services of
impoverished former Soviet WMD scientists. Yet, inexplicably, the Bush Administration has
sought to cut the very Nunn-Lugar funding designed to enable Russia to destroy its great
stocks of WMD.

The heart of the
threat is al Qaeda, not Iraq, and a US war against Iraq inevitably will divert strategic
attention and military resources away not only from the deteriorating situation in
Afghanistan and the destruction of al Qaeda, but also from Americas still
unacceptably weak homeland defenses. It was precisely for this reason that former National
Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft warned against an American attack on Iraq. Our
pre-eminent security priority . . . is the war on terrorism, he declared in August
2002. An attack on Iraq would seriously jeopardize, if not destroy, the global
counterterrorist campaign we have undertaken, in part because the international
unpopularity of a US attack on Iraq would result in a serious degradation in
international cooperation with us

11/12

against
terrorism.39 In that same month, TheNew
York Times Frank Rich commented that in Iraq we have chosen a first-strike
target, however thuggish, that may be tangential to the stateless, itinerant Islamic
terrorism of the youthful Mohamed Atta generation. TheWall Street Journals
Gerry Seib agreed: Saddam Hussein is 65 years old . . . and represents the threat of
yesterday and today. These young terrorists [of al Qaeda] are the threat of today and
tomorrow. And we shouldnt fool ourselves: By itself, taking out the Iraqi leader
will do little to eliminate them as a threat. In the short term, in fact, going after Iraq
may stir them up further. For former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright,
It makes little sense now to focus the worlds attention and our own military,
intelligence, diplomatic, and financial resources on a plan to invade Iraq instead of on
al Qaedas ongoing plans to murder innocent people. We cannot fight a second
monumental struggle without detracting from the first one.40

Indeed, because
virtually the entire Muslim world strongly opposes an American attack on Iraq, the Bush
Administration risks turning action against Iraq into a powerful recruiting tool for al
Qaeda which, by October 2002, had displayed clear signs of recovery via the apparent
survival of Osama bin Laden, bombings in Indonesia and the Philippines, and its
reconstitution of small training camps along the Pakistani-Afghan border.41 Unexpected Islamist electoral victories in
Pakistans Afghan border provinces in that same month were attributed in part to
popular backlash against threatened American military action against Iraq.42

Sound strategy
involves differentiation of threats and prioritizing of enemies. Lumping terrorist
organizations, weak states that harbor and assist them, and rogue states together into a
monolithic threat impairs the ability to discriminate and risks diversionary applications
of attention and resources. During the first two decades of the Cold War, the United
States treated communism as a centrally directed international monolith. In so doing, it
failed not only to discern critical national antagonisms within the communist world, but
also failed to recognize that communist insurgencies in the decolonizing Third World were
first and foremost the product of unique local circumstances, requiring tailored rather
than one-size-fits-all responses. The result of this strategic myopia was intervention and
defeat in Vietnam. Failure to differentiate the threats posed by Saddam Hussein and al
Qaeda is, likewise, a recipe for policy failure. Indeed, two former NSC staff members
responsible for counterterrorism issues recently concluded that the Bush
Administrations confusion about these matters and the ease with

12/13

which the war on al
Qaeda has blurred into a move against Iraq suggest that Americas leaders may not yet
have taken al Qaedas full measure.43

The Bush
Doctrine correctly dismisses the effectiveness of deterrence against suicidal terrorist
organizations, but it may be mistaken in dismissing its effectiveness against rogue
states.

Like other states,
rogue states have return addresses in the form of attackable assets, including
leaders who, unlike suicide bombers, value their lives. In the case of Iraq, these assets
include the person of Saddam Hussein, his internal security services, the Special
Republican Guard, the Republican Guard, the Bath Party leadership, and Saddams
palaces. The United States could destroy all of these targets with nuclear weapons in a
matter of minutes.

The Bush
Administration nonetheless has asserted that Iraq, and by implication the other axis
of evil states, Iran and North Korea, are notor at least may not
bedeterrable. The argument is twofold: Saddam has used WMD twice before, against his
own people and Iranian troops; and he is unbalanced, even mad.44 Yet
the fact that Saddam has already used WMD does not prove an immunity to deterrence because
his helpless victims were in no position to retaliate. (Saddam has always done well
against enemies that cant fight back.) Is it not significant that he refrained from
using WMD during the Gulf War against the United States and Israelenemies that were
in a position to launch devastating retaliation? And how does one explain the absence of
war on the Korean Peninsula for the last 50 years? North Korea is the longest-running
rogue state in the world today, and it is far better armed with WMD and means of
delivering them than is Iraq. Has not North Korea been effectively deterred for half a
century?

Philip Bobbitt, in
his magisterial The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History, has
questioned the argument that rogue states are not deterrable. Discussing the
advisability of ballistic missile defenses, which have been sold, like preemption, on the
grounds of rogue state undeterrability, Bobbitt asks:

Is it really
sensible to think that providing the great states of the West with ballistic missile
defenses would actually discourage a rogue state to a greater degree than the
assurance of nuclear annihilation that would surely follow such an attack [which] already
deters them today? To believe this assumes a psychological hypersensitivity to the mere
possibility of failure on the part of the leaderships of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea that
seems incompatible with their characters . . . and an indifference to survival that these
leaders, though they may seek it in their recruits, do not prominently display themselves.45

On the matter of
sanity, can Saddam really be compared to the suicide bombers of al Qaeda, who value a
cause more than their own lives? Is Saddam eager to throw away his own life and regime for
the sake of injuring the United States? Whatever the Iraqi dictator is or is not, is he
not above all a survivor who values his own life and position to the point of willingness
to massacre suspected

13/14

internal enemies and
to personally murder his own colleagues? Saddam is a rational and political
calculator who can reverse himself on a dime if his regime is threatened, says
Jerrold Post, former CIA profiler of Saddam Hussein. But he can become extremely
dangerous when he is backed into a corner.46

If there is an
argument to be made on behalf of Saddams undeterrability, it is his demonstrated
capacity for catastrophic miscalculation.47 He has plunged his country into three disastrous wars,48 completely misjudging the strength and will of his
adversaries; and he may well have dangerously convinced himself, as a result of the Gulf
War, that the acquisition of nuclear weapons will provide him immunity from American
military responses to future Iraqi aggression.

Personality cult
dictatorships are prone to strategic misjudgment. Mr. Hussein is often
unintentionally suicidal, contends Kenneth Pollack, former CIA analyst of the Iraqi
military and author of The
Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq. He is a risk-taker who plays
dangerous games without realizing how dangerous they truly are, because he is
deeply ignorant of the outside world and surrounded by sycophants who tell him what he
wants to hear.49 As such, he is very unlike Stalin, to
whom he has been compared by believers in the efficacy of traditional deterrence against
Saddam. Though cruel and ruthless, Stalin was also cautious and patient. That Saddam
[is] an admirer [of Stalin] and perhaps an intentional imitator I do not doubt,
observed 98-year-old George Kennan in late 2002. But the streak of adventurism that
has marked Saddams behavior was quite foreign to Stalin.50 Richard K. Betts believes that reckless as [Saddam]
has been, he has never yet done something Washington told him would be suicidal.51 To
be sure, his invasion of Kuwait turned out to be a disastrous miscalculation, but in
August 1990 Saddam had little reason to believe the United States would react the way it
did; indeed, far from attempting to deter the Iraqi dictator, the first Bush
Administration unwittingly gave him a green light. And there is no question that
Saddams invasion of Iran a decade earlier was also a profound misjudgment. But it
also was understandable: the Ayatollah Khomeini was openly attempting to subvert
Saddams regime.

The Bush
Doctrine rightly focuses on the principle of regime change as the most effective means of
defeating threats posed by rogue and terrorist-hosting weak states, but actual regime
change can entail considerable, even unacceptable, military and political risk, depending
upon local, regional, and international circumstances.

Doctrinal
prescription, if insensitive to the uniqueness and dominance of circumstance, is a recipe
for disaster. Again, George Kennan: I deplore doctrines. They purport to define
ones behavior in future situations where it may or may not be suitable.52 As noted, US intervention in the Vietnam War was the
product of dogmatic, indiscriminate anti-communism.

The issue is not the
desirability of regime change, but rather, in each specific case, its feasibility, costs,
risks, and potentially unintended consequences as weighed against the magnitude and
imminence of the threat. Pre-

14/15

ceding
administrations were content to treat symptoms of aggression; offenders were driven back
to their own borders or subjected to coercive diplomacy, but they were left intact, free
to fight another day. The first Bush Administration restricted its main Gulf War objective
to the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait; it failed to inflict a military defeat on
Iraq of sufficient magnitude to bring down Saddam Hussein, though at the moment of victory
Administration officials believed otherwise. The Clinton Administration recoiled from
initiating a decisive use of force in the Balkans against the Bosnian Serbs and later
Serbia, and countered al Qaeda attacks on American interests in Africa, the Middle East,
and Persian Gulf with ineffectual punitive missile strikes.

In contrast, the
current Bush Administration is prepared to go to the source of aggression, although with
respect to Iraq it has waffled on the scope of regime change.53 It toppled the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and seeks Saddam
Husseins destruction. In so doing, it extends to the 21st century an established
American practice of the 20th, in which the United States repeatedly overthrew regimes it
did not like in its own hemisphere and occasionally elsewhere.

But the rogue states
we face today are not banana republic weaklings, and terrorist-hosting weak states beckon
as strategic quagmires. Moreover, forcible regime change in the Islamic world, especially
given the American position in the Israeli-Palestinian war, risks converting the war on
terror into a clash of civilizations. The risk of sparking such a clash would
be particularly acute in the event that Saddam Hussein responded to an American attack by
launching WMD against Israel, which almost certainly would provoke Israeli retaliation in
kind. In the case of both Afghanistan and Iraq, furthermore, the Bush Administration has
focused almost all of its attention and resources on the firstand arguably the
easierhalf of the regime change challenge: getting rid of the old.

The more daunting
task is creating a new, enduring, and nonthreatening political order. What is the Bush
Administrations vision of a post-Saddam Iraq, and how much political energy and
military and financial clout is it prepared to expend on a new Iraq, and for how long? Or
is it sufficient simply to overthrow Saddam Hussein and then let Iraqs political
chips fall where they may? There has been a flood of Administration analyses and
statements on the necessity and means of toppling Saddam Hussein, but barely a trickle of
testimony on its post-Saddam preferences. Indeed, President Bushs first public
reference to Americas possible role in a post-Saddam Iraq came in a speech he
delivered on 5 October 2002, a full year after his Administration began talking of war
with Iraq.54 In that same month, Newt Gingrich,
referring to the mistake we made in Afghanistan, warned, with respect to Iraq,
You shouldnt go into a country militarily without having thought through what
it should look like afterward.55

Terminating wars in
a manner that produces a better and enduring peace is an inherently difficult task, and
the United States has a track record of botching war termination (e.g., World War I, the
Vietnam War, the Gulf War). There is certainly no encouragement in the Bush
Administrations visceral aversion to direct

15/16

participation in
nation-building, an aversion whose price is evident in the deteriorating
security situation in Afghanistan. Yet regime change imposes post-regime military,
political, and economic responsibilities. Failure to step up to those responsibilities not
only betrays those liberated by regime change but also invites a worse peace
that will incubate future threats.

Perhaps, however,
the Administration will make a serious effort to rebuild Iraq as a democratic
market state. Notwithstanding Iraqs terrible ethnic and religious cleavages, the
country is, after all, far more strategically important to the United States than is
Afghanistan, and the combination of a relatively well-educated population, huge proven oil
reserves, and a secular history offers a possible foundation upon which to build such a
state, which in turn could serve in the region as an alternative model to the
authoritarian and often economically discredited regimes that dominate the Middle East.56

In transforming
an implicit policy optionstriking firstinto a declaratory doctrine, the Bush
Administration has reinforced an image of America, widely held among friends and
adversaries alike, of a unilateralist, overbearing hyperpower insensitive to
the concerns of others.

During the 2000
presidential campaign, candidate Bush declared, Our nation stands alone right now in
the world in terms of power. And thats why weve got to be humble and project
strength in a way that promotes freedom. . . . If we are an arrogant nation, theyll
view us that way, but if were a humble nation, theyll respect us.57 Yet
preemption, and certainly preventive war, have never been associated with humility. For a
great power, the option of striking first is always available in a crisis, and against a
genuine threat justifying preemption, such as that posed to the United States by the
Soviet Unions clandestine deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962, the United
States could expect to carry world opinion, as it did then. But by elevating preemption
into an explicit doctrine, and by threatening Iraq with what smacks of preventive war, the
United States seems to be deliberately walking away from over a half-centurys effort
to embed its security in a web of multilateral institutions that reassure others that
American power will be used with restraint.

Pursuit of the
neo-conservative agenda of permanent American primacy via perpetual military supremacy,
and, as a matter of doctrine, an aggressive willingness to use force preemptively, even
preventively, to dispatch threatening regimes and promote the spread of American political
and economic institutions, invites perpetual isolation and enmity. As John Ikenberry
comments:

Americas
nascent neoimperial grand strategy threatens to rend the fabric of the international
community and political partnerships precisely at a time when that community and those
partnerships are urgently needed [to wage war against terrorist threats]. It is an
approach fraught with peril and likely to fail. It is not only politically unsustainable
but diplomatically harmful. And if history is any guide, it will trigger antagonism and
resistance that will leave America in a more hostile and divided world.58

16/17

The influence of
neo-conservative ideologues on the Bush White House has been much remarked upon.59 That influence has been evident in the
Administrations disdain for treaties and coalitions that in any way limit American
freedom of action, its pronounced one-sidedness on the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, its
preoccupation with regime change in Iraq, its proclamation of the use-of-force doctrine
that is the subject of this essay, and its confidence in the self-evident virtue of the
United States and its political and economic values as the agents of global
transformation.60 Long before 9/11, the neo-conservatives
were committed to a hyper-activist foreign policy based on large increases in defense
spending and a commitment to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and
values and to accept responsibility for Americas unique role in
preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity,
and our principles.61 In Iraq, they see an opportunity not only
to destroy a tyrant but also to demonstrate Americas will to use its unprecedented
power and to create a model state in Iraq for others in the region to follow. Beyond that,
they seek to prevent the emergence of any military rival. The National Security
Strategy not only declares the American objective of dissuad[ing] potential
adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in the hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the
power of the United States, but also lectures China, thought to be the coming
challenger, against pursuing advanced military capabilities . . . an outdated path
that, in the end, will hamper its pursuit of national greatness.62
Thus military supremacy is legitimate for the United States, but military modernization by
relatively weak China is not.

Pursuit of a
unilateralist, primacist agenda risks long-run insecurity for the United States. An
explicit American hegemony may appear [to the Administration] preferable to the messy
compromises of the existing order, but if it is nakedly based on commercial interests and
military power it will lack all legitimacy. Terror will continue, and worse, widespread
sympathy with terror. So warns Sir Michael Howard. He continues:

But American power
placed at the service of an international community legitimized by representative
institutions and the rule of law, accepting its constraints and inadequacies but
continually working to improve them: that is a very different matter. . . . [The United
States] must cease to think of itself as a heroic lone protagonist in a cosmic war against
evil, and reconcile itself to a less spectacular and more humdrum role: that
of the leading participant in a flawed but still indispensable system of cooperative
global governance.63

In fairness to
proponents of preemption, however, it should be pointed out that neither preemption nor,
certainly, regime change are new to American statecraft. Before the War of 1812, James
Madison authorized military operations in Spanish Florida in an attempt to preempt the
British from using it as a base from which to attack the United States. Indeed, the
subsequently proclaimed Monroe Doctrine was aimed at preempting renewed European military
intervention in the Western Hemisphere. The post-Civil War US winter campaigns

17/18

against the Western
Indians were preemptive in nature. In 1898, the United States launched a preemptive attack
on a Spanish fleet in the Philippines even though that target and locus had nothing to do
with the origins of the Spanish-American War. NSC-68 (1950) explicitly accepted the idea
of a preemptive nuclear attack if a Soviet attack was known to be on its way or about to
be launched.64 During the Cold War, the United States
engineered the covert (e.g., Guatemala, Iran) and overt (e.g., Grenada) overthrow of
regimes it believed were precursors to the establishment of expanded Soviet power and
influence. US intervention in Vietnam was justified as a means of preventing the other
Asian dominoes from falling to communism. And US action during the Cuban
Missile Crisis of 1962 was preemptive to the extent that the US naval
quarantine of Cuba and threat of nuclear retaliation against the Soviet Union
were aimed at forestalling the establishment on the island of a permanent force of Soviet
medium-range nuclear ballistic missiles. To be sure, President Kennedy found a way out of
the crisis short of war, but he did warn that we no longer live in a world where
only the actual firing of weapons represents a sufficient challenge to a nations
security to constitute maximum peril.65
Great powers have a habit of intervening to forestall smaller problems from becoming
larger problems.

For the United
States, the risk is doctrinal degeneration into an excuse for attacking regimes we simply
dont like versus regimes that pose genuine preemptive threats. The
doctrine invites abuse because it offers no criteria by which to judge a threat justifying
a preemptive strike. A rogue state is not automatically a target for preemption; if it
were, the Bush Administration would be talking about a war with Iran and not talking at
all to North Korea. Indeed, what justifies an attack on Iraq but not on Iran or North
Korea, which, like Iraq, the Administration has identified as axis of evil
states? Had the Bush Doctrine been in place after World War II, could it have been invoked
against the Soviet Union and Communist China, both of which met the new National Security Strategy definition
of a rogue state and were pursuing the acquisition of nuclear weapons until 1949 and 1964,
respectively? Because the doctrine sets no bounds, argues an analysis of the National
Security Strategy, might the US again choose preemption even though deterrence
would this time be appropriate? And knowing this, might others be more likely to strike
even earlierrequiring the US to improve its first strike capabilities in return? The
logic of offense and defense could make a world of unbounded preemption very ugly
indeed.66

A Brookings
Institution critique concludes that the Bush Doctrines silence on the
circumstances that justify preemption raises the danger that other countries
will embrace the preemption argument as a cover for settling their own national
security scores. . . . [U]ntil the Administration can define the line separating
justifiable preemption from unlawful aggression in ways that will gain widespread
adherence abroad, it risks seeing its words used to justify ends

18/19

it opposes.67 Russia has already invoked American endorsement of
preemption as justifying possible military action against Georgia, from which Chechen
separatists (or terrorists, if you prefer) conduct operations in Chechnya. India could
attack Pakistan, happily invoking the Bush Doctrine on the charge of Pakistans
sponsorship of terrorism in Kashmir. And China could justify a preventive war against
Taiwan as a means of forestalling its threatened independence or unfavorable (to China)
alteration of the military balance across the Taiwan Strait. It cannot be in either
the American national interest or the worlds interest, argues Henry Kissinger,
to develop principles that grant every nation an unfettered right of preemption
against its own definition of threats to its security.68

However convincing
the case for an attack on Iraq, preemption as a declaratory doctrine lacking criteria but
applicable to a generic category of states invites real trouble after Iraq, and for that
reason could turn out to be a poor, even impossible basis for Americas relations
with the rest of the world.

Coda

In the earliest
years of the Cold War, before the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb, there were
calls in the United States for preventive war against another evil dictator. The calls
continued even after the Soviets detonated their first bomb in 1949. Indeed, in the
following year, the Commandant of the Air Forces new Air War College publicly asked
to be given the order to conduct a nuclear strike against fledgling Soviet atomic
capabilities. And when I went to Christ, said the Commandant, I think I
could explain to Him why I wanted to do it now before its too late. I think I could
explain to Him that I had saved civilization. With it [the A-bomb] used in time, we can
immobilize a foe [and] reduce his crime before it happened.69

President Truman
fired the Commandant, preferring instead a long, hard, and, in the end, stunningly
successful policy of containment and deterrence.

NOTES

1. Restated in The
National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington: White House,
September 2002), p. 13. Hereinafter referred to as National Security Strategy.

22. Quoted in David
E. Sanger, Beating Them to the Prewar, The New York Times, 28 September
2002.

23. Quoted in
Michael Elliot, Strike First, Explain Yourself Later, Time, 24 June
2002, http://www.time.com/columnist/elliot/article/0,9565,265536,00.html. Webster was
referring to an incident in 1837 in which Canadian forces attacked a US ship, the Caroline,
above Niagara Falls, believed to be conveying supporters of a rebellion against British
rule in Canada. The British claimed to have acted in self-defense, a claim that Webster
rejected with his dictum on preemption.

25. On 8 September
2002, Senator Bob Graham, Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, stated
that Administration officials have recently let Saddam Hussein know what the
consequences of his use of a weapon of mass destruction . . . against any of his neighbors
[would be], and that would be annihilation. Senator Richard C. Shelby, Vice Chairman
of the Committee, also stated that Saddam Hussein had been formally warned of
extinction if he used such a weapon. Joyce Howard Price, U.S. Reprisal
to Be Annihilation, Washington Times, 9 September 2002.

29. Richard N.
Haass, Intervention, The Use of American Military Force in the Post-Cold War Era (Washington:
Carnegie Endowment for World Peace, 1994), p. 51.

30. For an
assessment of explicit and implicit US political objectives in the Gulf War, see Jeffrey
Record, Hollow Victory, A Contrary View of the Gulf War (McLean, Va.:
Brasseys [US], 1993), pp. 50-56.

38. Cited in Alison
Mitchell and Carl Hulse, C.I.A. Warns that a U.S. Attack May Ignite Terror, The
New York Times, 9 October 2002. Also see Dana Priest, Analysts Discount Attack
by Iraq, The Washington Post, 9 October 2002.

43. Benjamin and
Simon, p. 385. Also see Tony Judt, The Wrong War at the Wrong Time, The New
York Times, 20 October 2002.

44. In his West
Point speech, President Bush referred to the threat of unbalanced dictators with
weapons of mass destruction (Speech at West Point). Subsequently, he spoke of
Saddams madness (Allen).

47. For an excellent
presentation of this argument, see Kenneth M. Pollack, Why Iraq Cant Be
Deterred, The New York Times, 26 September 2002.

48. The Second
Kurdish War of 1974-75, the Iraq-Iran War of 1980-88, and the Gulf War of 1990-91.

49. Pollack,
Why Iraq Cant Be Deterred. For a rejoinder, see Steve Chapman, Is
Hussein Too Crazy for Us to Control? Chicago Tribune, 3 October 2002. Also
see Jack F. Matlock, Jr., Deterring the Undeterrable, New York Times Book
Review, 20 October 2002, p. 47.

50. Interviewed by
and quoted in Jane Mayer, A Doctrine Passes, The New Yorker, 14 and 21
October 2002, http://ebird.dtic.mil/Oct2002/s20021008doctrine.htm. For a comparison of
Saddam, Stalin, and Hitler as risk-takers, see Pollack, The Threatening Storm, pp.
252-56.

53. In mid-October
2002, President Bush and other Administration officials declared that regime change could
be accomplished in Iraq without Saddam Husseins removal as long as Iraq was
completely, verifiably, and permanently disarmed of its WMD. See Joyce Howard Price,
Disarmed Saddam Can Stay in Power, U.S. Says, Washington Times, 21
October 2002; and David E. Sanger, Bush Declares U.S. is Using Diplomacy to Disarm
Hussein, The New York Times, 22 October 2002.

54. David E. Sanger,
Bush Tells Critics Hussein Could Strike at Any Time, The New York Times,
6 October 2002, http://ebird.dtic.mil/Oct2002/s20021007/tells.htm.

55. Quoted in James
Dao and Eric Schmitt, Rift Over Plan to Impose Rule on Iraq, The New York
Times, 10 October 2002.

56. For two
assessments of potential US roles in a post-Saddam Iraq, see James Fallows, The
Fifty-First State?, and Robert D. Kaplan, A Post-Saddam Scenario, Atlantic
Monthly, November 2002, pp. 53-64 and 88-90, respectively.

57. 2nd
Presidential Debate Between Gov. Bush and Vice President Gore, The New York Times,
12 October 2000.

60. For early
expositions of the neoconservative primacist foreign policy agenda, see Joshua
Muravchik, The Imperative of American Leadership, A Challenge to Neo-Isolationism (Washington:
AEI Press, 1996), and Zalmay Khalilzad, From Containment to Global Leadership? America
and the World After the Cold War (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, 1995). Later works
include Robert Kagan, The Benevolent Empire, Foreign Policy, No. 111
(Summer 1998), pp. 24-35; American PowerFor What? A Symposium, Commentary,
109 (January 2000), 21-47; Robert A. Kagan and William Kristol, eds., Present Dangers:
Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy (San Francisco:
Encounter Books, 2000); and Donald Kagan and Frederick W. Kagan, While America Sleeps:
Self-Delusion, Military Weakness and the Threat to Peace Today (New York: St.
Martins Press, 2000). For an exposition of an extreme neoconservatives
anticipated consequences of Saddam Husseins removal, see Michael Ledeen, The
War on Terror Wont End in Baghdad, The Wall Street Journal, 4 September
2002.

61. Statement
of Principles, Project for the New American Century, 3 June 1997.

Jeffrey Record is a
former professional staff member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and senior fellow
at the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis. His latest book, Making War, Thinking
History: Munich, Vietnam, and Presidential Uses of Force from Korea to Kosovo, was
published in March 2002 by the Naval Institute Press.